- Elimination
- Reintroduction
- Maintenance
- Dinner
Lemon Herb Chicken with Roasted Potatoes
The dinner we recommend to everyone in week one. One pan, six ingredients, no allium, and it tastes like a normal roast rather than a restricted one.
- Prep
- 10 min
- Cook
- 35 min
- Total
- 45 min
- Serves
- 4
Published · Updated
Ingredients
Makes 4 servings. Each ingredient is labelled with its FODMAP status at this quantity.
- Low FODMAP
8 bone-in, skin-on chicken thighs
Meat contains no FODMAPs. Check that it is not pre-marinated or basted.
- Low FODMAP
750 g waxy potatoes, cut into 3 cm wedges
No FODMAP limit. Leave the skin on for fibre.
- Low FODMAP
3 tbsp garlic-infused olive oil
Use commercially prepared oil, not home-infused — home infusion in oil carries a botulism risk.
- Low FODMAP
1 lemon, half juiced and half sliced
- Low FODMAP
2 tbsp fresh rosemary and thyme, chopped
- Low FODMAP
2 spring onions, green tops only, sliced
Green tops are low FODMAP; the white bulb is high in fructans. Cut where the colour changes.
- Low FODMAP
1 tsp sea salt and cracked black pepper
What the labels mean
- Low FODMAPSafe at the serving size listed.
Method
Step 1: Heat the oven to 200°C / 400°F fan. Pat the chicken thighs completely dry with paper towel — dry skin is the whole difference between crisp and rubbery.
Step 2: Toss the potato wedges with 2 tablespoons of the garlic-infused oil, half the herbs, and a good pinch of salt. Spread them in a single layer across a large sheet pan, leaving gaps for the chicken.
Step 3: Rub the chicken thighs with the remaining oil, the lemon juice, the rest of the herbs, salt and plenty of pepper. Settle them skin-side up among the potatoes.
Step 4: Tuck the lemon slices between the pieces. Roast for 35 minutes, until the skin is deep golden and a thermometer in the thickest thigh reads 75°C / 165°F.
Step 5: Rest for 5 minutes on the pan, then scatter with the sliced spring onion greens and serve straight from the tray.
Notes and swaps
- Crowding the pan steams the potatoes instead of roasting them. Use two pans rather than one if your tray is small.
- Swap rosemary for oregano and add a handful of pitted olives to push this towards a Greek flavour without adding any FODMAPs.
- Leftovers keep for three days and are excellent cold, shredded over spinach with a squeeze of lemon.
There is a particular low point in the first week of elimination, usually around day four, when you have eaten plain rice for three consecutive dinners and begin to wonder whether food is going to be joyless for the rest of the protocol. This is the recipe for that evening.
It works because it does not taste like a diet. Garlic-infused oil does almost all the heavy lifting — it delivers the rounded, savoury base note that garlic normally provides, without any of the fructans that cause trouble. Once you understand that trick, a very large part of ordinary home cooking reopens to you.
Why this one is worth learning first
Three reasons. It uses a single pan, which matters more than it sounds when you are also managing symptoms and fatigue. It scales cleanly from two people to six without any recalculation. And every ingredient in it is a pantry staple you will use across dozens of other elimination-phase meals, so nothing goes to waste.
The potatoes deserve a specific mention. Potato is one of the very few starches with no FODMAP ceiling at all, which makes it the most forgiving thing on your plate during elimination. When a meal leaves you hungry, more potato is always a safe answer.
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